remember me, for centuries-
by wearethewitches
Summary: belief, my darling, just believe in me / for the writing on the stone does not match the age of our souls.


"Belief is power, Kitty," her father tells her when she's too young to understand. "Belief is the reason I existed."

CatCo is a gleaming beacon in the sky. In times of disaster and fear, people look to it because that's where _the Queen of All Media reigns_. When Supergirl appeared, she was what people looked at, but they saw her through CatCo, through the Tribune – through _Cat Grant_. When Cat Grant gets thrown off a balcony, they see her frailty and fear and see themselves. They rise for her, for _the Queen of All Media who was thrown off a balcony_ and Supergirl is demonised. Cat Grant is power and National City believe in her, believe that what she says is gospel. She is the most powerful woman in National City.

" _Well Sara, that's a misnomer. Nobody is calling me 'the most powerful woman in National City'. I believe they are calling me 'the most powerful person'._ "

Cat Grant is the most powerful person in National City.

"Belief is power, Kitty," her father tells her when she's too young to understand, when he is fading and flickering in front of her eyes. "Belief is the reason I existed."

Carter Grant I was born on the first of July, 1782. He created an empire of his own inside a town hall, his face and voice known to all those of the village of _Carperton_ that would one day become _National City_. Belief in him kept him young in body and his people revered him. Three generations of belief kept him young, hale and hearty – and then they stopped believing. One sentence from a newcomer sparks turmoil and conflict and belief fades. What power that kept him as he was leaves his domain, that town hall where he had ruled with an iron fist and comes unto him.

The twentieth century brings a family and white hair. Katherine Grant flees the sight of him, her last trust that he would live dying and Catherine Grant staying by his side as he ages, flickers and disappears from existence. The dust of his bones settles in the ground beneath a gravestone over a hundred years old that simply appears, as if he were never a god at all.

Cat Grant is the most powerful person in National City.

Time goes on and Supergirl stays. She does not age and she does not falter, even as her family and loved ones drop like insects around her. _Mayflies_ , Cat Grant murmurs to Kara, as her once-more assistant organises her schedule. They both are baffled over Cat's lack of aging, but eventually, as Carter II joins them – he, a beacon of _space flight_ , _alien amnesty_ and _planet hopping_ – they stop speaking of it. It is a fact of nature that the world accepts and has long gotten over.

Then Kara Zor-El invites them both to Clark Kent's funeral.

"Clark was human. He was never Kryptonian, no matter his blood. When he was Superman, he thought himself a god. He was never a god," Kara says on a podium, hands resting gently on his coffin. "He was human and he was as mortal as any other human."

Cat thinks of her father, Carter and his headstone, which reads _1782 to 1830_ instead of _1902 to 1971_ and she thinks of her son Carter, who still looks nineteen years old every time he tours a new planet, hundred of thousands of light-years away.

"Belief is a power," she says when it's her turn, looking at Kara. "Belief…is why we still exist today, why we aren't ash and dust in the ground. The fundamental difference between Supergirl and Superman was that he was deceiving himself his whole life, thinking himself separate from a persona that Supergirl truly was and _is_. His powers were a gift, a curse and a duty. His natural death marks him apart and today we say goodbye to Clark Kent and not Kal-El, because Kal-El never existed. I knew him as an idiot reporter with an obsession for the woman who would one day become his wife. I hope you're happy, wherever you are now and morbid as it is, I hope Lois joins you there."

Lois in the crowd claps only a little, her frail old bones weak but her mind still as sharp as ever. When she dies a month later and Cat speaks at her funeral, she calls her a catty bitch for revealing they slept together the day before her death, as if she were the Harrison Ford to her Carrie Fisher. To spite her – _never to spite, only to celebrate, Lois was her_ _ **best friend**_ – Cat announces her looming nuptials with Kara Zor-El, stealing the show.

It is a tether, a tether between two women who fought and argued and loved each other, that will be her downfall.

Two hundred years onward, three hundred and eight-two years after Cat Grant is born, a newcomer scoffs at how _the Queen of All Media_ isn't dead yet. _She slept with Lois Lane, after all and they were only human._ It's like Chinese Whispers and it takes time, for the universe is so very, very large and Cat, Carter and Kara El-Grant don't even hear word of the rumour for another eight hundred years.

They all believe in each other so much, but the few people of the universe left who remembered them died decades ago. A rumour, a thought: _the Queen of All Media should be dead and so should both her wife and son_.

It's infectious, like a disease, but those that remembered them have died and all their power reverted to them. They live another hundred years before they turn to dust and their names appear on an old, old archive, listing the last hundred billion to have died on Earth before it was blasted from the sky.

 _CATHERINE GRANT, 1964-2089_

 _KARA DANVERS, 1991-2158_

 _CARTER GRANT JUNIOR, 2002-2130_

The universe forgets their names.


End file.
